'The Bell Curve' 20 years later A Q&A with Charles Murray
Reflecting on the legacy of “The Bell Curve,” what stands out to you?
I’m not going to try to give you a balanced answer to that question, but take it in the spirit you asked it—the thing that stands out in my own mind, even though it may not be the most important. I first expressed it in the Afterword I wrote for the softcover edition of “The Bell Curve.” It is this: The reaction to “The Bell Curve” exposed a profound corruption of the social sciences that has prevailed since the 1960s. “The Bell Curve” is a relentlessly moderate book — both in its use of evidence and in its tone — and yet it was excoriated in remarkably personal and vicious ways, sometimes by eminent academicians who knew very well they were lying. Why? Because the social sciences have been in the grip of a political orthodoxy that has had only the most tenuous connection with empirical reality, and too many social scientists think that threats to the orthodoxy should be suppressed by any means necessary. Corruption is the only word for it.
Now that I’ve said that, I’m also thinking of all the other social scientists who have come up to me over the years and told me what a wonderful book “The Bell Curve” is. But they never said it publicly. So corruption is one thing that ails the social sciences. Cowardice is another.
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
[ an Amazon review ]
by
the late
Richard Herrnstein and
Charles Murray
It caused two
reactions. The first was furious abuse. The second was a news black out. This is not
quite censorship but it has the same effect. Their sin was to write about
intelligence and race honestly. Pushing the
Multiculturalism line would have
been all right. Telling the truth was not and is not. Their important point is
that there are differences in the average intelligence of races which have important
results. People in America have IQs averaging around 100. Blacks in America
average 85; those in Africa achieve 70. Jews come in higher at 115. Look
at the statistical connections between IQ and success to know why it matters.
People in prison tend to low IQs. Those with real
Nobel Prizes average high.
This excludes the Nobel committee's sillier awards and political awards in
literature and other areas where waffle predominates. If you get abused by the
left you may well have something worth saying and worth hearing.
The book tells us that intelligent parents are better parents. Does this sound reasonable? The competent tend to be better off, not drunkards, drug addicts or smokers. They tell children why rather than just giving orders, which encourages them to think. See pp 203 et seq especially 205-6
The Welfare State incites women to have illegitimate children or does it enable them to do what they want without having to find husbands? See page 186 for a discussion.
The Bell Curve Flattened
Was written by
Nicholas
Lemann, a journalist with an agenda. Play spot the bias; it's easy.
He has taken against CM & RH, telling us that Charles Murray is a
cunning propagandist who massages his figures to get the result he wants.
Believe it if you want. Our critic tells us that CM & RH used a longitudinal
study but in fact they used the huge bodies of results from American army
testing before two world wars as well as many others including a
National
Longitudinal Survey run by the American government [
NLSY97 or
NLSY79 ]
The Bell Curve also tells us that men in the business are pretty much agreed on the evidence; it changes when the left talk to the press. I believe The Bell Curve rather than their critic.
A Book
Without An Audience
The
Z Man [ a heavyweight mathematician - see
Christopher
Zeeman &
Fellow
of the Royal Society ] tells us that Doctor
Charles Murray has written a good [ article ] but aimed it at the wrong audience, people
who hate the truth, who want America overrun by
Third World parasites and other liabilities. He is very much on the
right lines.
QUOTE
Charles Murray is arguably the leading conservative intellectual in
America today, so when he has something to say, people on the right pay
attention. This time it is a mercifully short
book titled Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America.
It is a comprehensive summary of the biological reality of race. It also
argues that elites need to face this reality or risk fueling the growth of
white identity politics.
Although unaddressed by Murray, the true political divide in America is over race and the reality of human biology. On the left are the blank-slate egalitarians. They remain convinced that human beings are amorphous blobs that can be shaped by society into whatever society wants. The other side are those who accept biological reality and the implications it holds for human organization and social policy.
Murray is targeting the people on the blank-slate side of the divide with this book, because they are the people who run the country. They control the global corporations, the financial system, the academy, the media, and the culture. They are also the people behind the antiwhite pogroms so popular today. It is Murray’s fellow whites in the ruling class who are waging the war on whiteness.
One bit of unintentional irony here is that shortly after Murray released this book, the ruling elite cooked up the ridiculous holiday of Juneteenth. Just in case it was not obvious, both political parties decided we had to have another day on the calendar to remind white people of racial reality. Combined with the total silence from elite opinion journals, it is fair to say his target audience is not taking Murray’s advice.
Despite the fact that no one in his target audience will read the book, it is an excellent summary of the important data regarding race. Murray summarizes the mountain of data we have on cognitive ability. It is now beyond any doubt that the races are not equal when it comes to intelligence. The IQ hierarchy is Jews, then East Asians, Europeans, Latin Americans, and then Africans at the bottom.
He then explains how intelligence strongly correlates with life outcomes like educational attainment, employment, and so on. On average, being highly intelligent is a big advantage in life, even in areas that are not very demanding. The smart truck driver will perform better than the dumb truck driver. In more demanding fields like science and finance, intelligence is the defining quality, the basis for success.
Murray addresses the claims from science deniers that there is no such thing as intelligence or that the tests themselves are a tool of white supremacy. Murray explains that the data on intelligence is overwhelming and no serious cognitive scientist contests the findings. Most important, intelligence testing is predicative, which is the benchmark for scientific research. IQ is as much a part of our biology as eye color, and it is an important predictor of life outcomes.
It is when Murray gets to crime that the futility of his project is clear. Everyone, especially his target audience, understands the color of crime. The reason his fellow academics live like white nationalists is they know that blacks commit an enormous amount of crime. Whites and Asians are at the other end. This is why Murray and his colleagues live in the whitest places on earth.
For this reason, the chapters on crime can be skipped by those on the reality side of the great divide. Crime is the reason most dissidents suspect that the other side knows the score on race and biology. Not only is the color of crime impossible to ignore, but the behavior patterns of the ruling elite also confirm it. There is a reason the best neighborhoods have the worst high school basketball teams.
The mortal flaw in Murray’s book is that it is bookended by the same liberal insanity that is behind the war on white people. He begins with a chapter titled “The American Creed Imperiled,” which is a restating of the old bromides about America being founded as an egalitarian experiment. Of course, he starts with the famous line from the Declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
He then goes on to explain the history of America as a journey toward the egalitarian paradise promised in the Declaration. This is right out of the second founding thesis popularized by Harry Jaffa in the last century. The claim is that the real founding document was not the Constitution, but the Declaration. The Civil War was the perfecting of the original founding of the country.
The people who injected this nonsense into the DNA of the American ruling class after the Second World War are behind the current war on white people. Their undermining of white society is driven by ideological fervor, not liberal ideals. The fact that Murray cannot see this or accept it is why his brand of conservatism was a massive failure and why his book will be ignored by his target audience.
The final chapter is where things go off the rails for Murray. His primary reason for writing the book is not to educate his friends and neighbors on the reality of race, but to warn them that their overt hatred of white people could lead to a backlash. Seeing every tribe in the country use identity politics to advance their interests could lead to whites embracing the same thing. According to Murray, that would be worse than death.
This is why Murray is the most brilliant example of the modern conservative. He fully embraces the morality of the other side, while complaining about how they are implementing their morality. In this case, his premise is the left-wing assertion that white solidarity is the worst thing possible, because white people are by nature the evilest people on the planet. In other words, he endorses the blood libel against whites.
In the end, the title of the book is ironic. It is men like Charles Murray, the old conservative guard, who refuse to accept reality. America will be a majority-minority society in a couple of decades. No society has existed peacefully under such an arrangement, especially when a tiny minority sits at the top, maintaining itself by pitting one group against another.
If there was a time for making the points Murray makes in his book, it was half a century ago when the usual suspects were opening the gates to immigrants. America was 90% white and ready to do something about the black population. Maybe in 1985, when the country was 85% white, this argument would have been helpful. In 2020 it is just more defeatism from the people who are largely to blame for the current crisis.
Further, facts and reason are not how one deals with a partisan. This is something the long struggle with communism should have taught guys like Murray. Instead, this generation of so-called conservatives stubbornly clings to the childish notion that their ideas alone will defeat the left. They think if they present the facts the right way, their opponents will throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers.
Given his age, this will probably be Murray’s last book, and it is a
fitting end to his career and his generation’s politics. A determined
unwillingness to accept the reality of partisan politics and the
unwillingness to defend the institutions of society are where the blame lies
for the current crisis. Those who survive the looming demographic
catastrophe and begin the task of rebuilding the West will look back at this
book and wonder why it ever needed to be written.
UNQUOTE
Some people are on one side of the Nature
Versus Nurture argument; some are on the other. The
Lunatic Fringe is firmly in the ascendant but
it too will pass.
